To mark the 50th anniversary of the Wesleyan University Press, poet James Tate, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Selected Poems was first published by the Press, spoke on Wednesday, Oct. 10 in Russell House. Tate, who published his first volume of poetry in 1967 and has published fourteen additional titles, has had four collections with the University Press.
A winner of the National Book Award and a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1971, Tate is a key voice in modern American poetry.
On Wednesday, Tate filled the room with his languid, heavy voice. He read methodically from a large, yet-to-be-published text, giving plenty of room for the nuances kicking around under his otherwise unadorned speech patterns to emerge. He paused when he anticipated laughter and read haltingly, waiting as if to make sure that he had heard every possible sound that the audience might make. He said that his lecture was his first time reading from the new manuscript.
The poems moved together in an organized system, illustrating the general necessity of needing to know the whereabouts of myriad lost characters. Often a person seeking or a person being sought is either dead, in a remote geographic location or removed from reality in a way that hints at some degree of permanence. Tate’s extremely direct language exposes wonderfully bizarre situations that are always slightly and irreparably awry.
Tate’s poetry features selectively developed characters who speak in clear, even prose, in lines such as: “A big part of reality has been removed, it has been reported” and “I called her my princess to make up for my shortcomings.” His reading voice, both sardonic and laconic, lent itself to his deceptively complex style of writing. Stringing together a series of short, prosy sentences outlining trends of selective omniscience, Tate creates a particular brand of language that is difficult to internalize without feeling both enlightened and confused.
Tate’s use of classic American names—Carl, Harvey, Judson, Mavis, Josephine, Loretta, Beatrice—provided the audience with a context in which to conceptualize the setting for the work.
Tate’s brilliance came through with particular force when he was able to construct basic sentences that both incited laughter and indicated vulnerability.
“Loretta has a rooster that was so fierce that no one could visit her anymore,” Tate read, challenging the audience to imagine themselves in Loretta’s place.
Tate plans to release the new manuscript in April.
Leave a Reply